60 Minutes

I'm actually watching 60 Minutes. The show, the story part, not just Andrew Rooney. I'm crazy about him and the more I read his book, the more I like him and find him enjoyable. He looks at life a lot like I do.

But back to this. On this 60 Minutes, they are discussing the DNA process. Apparently, too many people come up with partial matches. So many alleles in common, and it is not a direct match, but it indicates a direct relationship. Twenty alleles out of 26 in common is a first line relative - parent, sibling, child. Some of the problem is "genetic surveillance" - if you get a close partial match, then the whole family will be scrutinised. Now, take the DNA database... most of the people in it are criminals. Let's face it, it makes sense that the citizenry most likely to be in the AFIS and DNA databases are people who have been through the criminal system. If you look at the largest group in prisons, it is African Americans. If this DNA thing gets out and police or criminalists begin using the information to look into entire families, this will make the disparity bigger between pinpointed African Americans and Caucasoid people.

I don't think that more African Americans do crimes than do Caucasoid people. I think that this country has long had a poor history with minority groups and that this long history (coupled with much less effective criminal forensics) has allowed society to jail African Americans or Hispanic people or anyone else labeled a "minority" more than us pristine, non-crime committing white folks.

You don't really think that having less pigmentation makes you less likely to commit a crime, do you? If you do, yikes! How stupid are you!?

So I don't know if this makes a compelling argument against allowing crime labs to search databases for common or partial hits. It certainly doesn't to me.

Who thinks of this and makes this amazing new way of catching criminals into a bad thing? DNA matching is a beautiful thing. This guy Darryl Hunt spent 19 years in jail for a rape/murder he did not commit. The real guy was caught when a partial match came up for a guy in another jail. The state of North Carolina allows searches through the database on partial hits. They checked it out. 20 of the 26 aliles came up as a hit. That would be a full-blood sibling.

The guy who came up as a partial has 11 siblings, six of whom were dead. One older brother was in another prison. They gave him a cigarette in an interview, took the smoked butt back to the lab and got a full hit. All 30 alleles, all 26 loci matched. That is 13 whatevers in common. And you wouldn't allow this testing?! Why not? If it is so effective in solving crimes, then by all means, use it!

Sometimes the complexity people put into a simple situation just amazes me.